Do your clients pay attention to customer experience? If not, they certainly should.
Several studies point to how poor customer experiences in multi-channel, mobile, and self-service interactions negatively impact buying decisions. And no wonder – by 2020, 85% of a typical customer’s interaction with an enterprise will not involve a human being .
What those customer interactions will involve is your clients’ enterprise networks.
The downside of tradition
Trouble is, traditional approaches to enterprise networking are no longer able to support the kinds of customer experience businesses must deliver in a world where, by 2020, one million new devices will go online every hour .
So if your clients’ networks remain traditional – box-by-box deployments and manual provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting – the onslaught of devices, data, and clouds is likely already impairing their network performance. And their business.
A new network architecture
Fortunately, with the right enterprise networking partner you can show your clients the way to new network architectures that improve network performance while also masking networking complexities. This transformation involves:
- Open, software-driven, and programmable network architectures that use network virtualization to decouple hardware and software, thus driving end-to-end visibility and enabling third-party applications to run over the network as well as enabling services to run on any platform;
- Proactive, policy-based automation that provides an abstracted, simplified network platform to power speedier, less risky application and service rollouts as well as consistent policy enforcement, so IT staff
- Cloud services with the on-demand scalability to ensure fast deployment and affordable support for broad partner ecosystems;
- Network-embedded, context-based security that stretches from the enterprise edge to the cloud instead of perimeter-based, reactive security; and
- Business-focused real-time analytics (rather than more limited IT-centric analytics) that can improve business decision-making by gleaning insights from user, device, application, network, and threat data gathered across the network.
Let the enterprise network evolution begin
Transforming enterprise networks to meet customer demands takes deep expertise. Most immediately, your clients will need to adapt their enterprise networks with:
Software-defined WANs (SD-WANs) to provide the end-to-end programmability, cross-domain automated networking, and augmentation/replacement of data center “demilitarized zones” with points-of-presence hosted in co-location facilities, thus avoiding back-hauling cloud-destined traffic.
Network programmability at the controller level as well as the device level, which delivers much-needed network scalability and simplification.
Network functions virtualization (NFV) to boost agility by assigning CPU, SSL, memory, and interfaces to each virtual machine, so networks can more easily provision, chain, and scale services (notably in networks supporting branches).
Wi-fi integration that brings untethered users and devices into the enterprise network fold with voice-over-wi-fi – the transfer of mobile calls to a wi-fi network – and low-power wireless access (LPWA), which offers scalable solutions for low-cost, geographically-dispersed sensors.
Don’t try to do it alone. Get the help your clients need.